Summer of Love etc..

We did end up at Glen Cove marina for a couple of nights and as with everywhere else we have gone, we received a wonderful reception.  We did find out on Sunday however that the entrance was only 2 ft at low tide.  We had NO idea and by pure good fortune we came in at relatively high tide.  What clued us in was the fact that when I got up Sunday morning we were sitting gently in the mud!  The trip down from Decker Island was about what we expected, hard on the wind and relatively slow.  We had planned to leave at 06:00 Saturday morning but when we woke up, the wind was about 25 knots and we decided to wait a day, after all we’re cruising, no rush right!  By 08:30, the first of 4 boatloads of kids etc were being dropped off on shore, jet skis were beginning to buzz.  The anchorage became a water ski zone with everyone deciding to ski around our boat.  To put it bluntly we got a pretty pissed off so we left around 12:30 in the afternoon.   We made it to Glen Cove by 19:30.

We left Glen Cove on Tuesday ad had a great sail into San Francisco.  We got a slip at the San Francisco Marina by the Golden Gate Yacht club.  We spent the next couple of days doing the tourist thing, Fisherman’s Wharf, China Town, Alcatraz Island.  We had a great time.  Thursday we headed back to the Oakland Yacht Club where Craig (the manager) had found us a berth for the month of September.  It’s a pretty nice place to hole up for awhile as we get a few things sorted on the boat.  We did make it to the 40^th anniversary of the Summer of Love festival at Golden Gate park on the 2^nd.  More freaks and hippies per square meter than we have seen since early days at the Blue Skies Music Festival in Ontario.  It was great.  There was at least 50,000 people by 1 pm and everyone was in a good mood.  Good music, great weather, weird poetry, interesting people, more weird poetry, lots more interesting people, you get the idea.  The last week has been spent in just mucking about, talking ourselves out of spending money on the boat.  The only big things we did buy were a used tiller pilot for the wind vane and a dual-racor fuel filter system.  We also unfortunately had to remove one water tank as the seam split.  We have decided not to replace it as we still store 55 gallons and have the water maker.  The tank that died only held 15 gallons and for the 150 bucks it would take to replace it, we can by a lot of jugs of water.  If we need to we can get a standard tank pretty much anywhere to put in.  In the meantime, we plan on using the space to store chain and a spare anchor to better balance the boat.  We are here for another 2-3 weeks before we head further south.